Whats New in Oracle Policy Automation November 2017 #1
With the regularity of a Swiss watch, the Oracle Policy Automation team have released the latest and greatest version of their flagship natural language business rules and automated decision tool : and as usual it is packed with lots of new things for us to get excited about. Here are just a few of the key points that are in the list this time, along with some examples. Let’s look at whats new in Oracle Policy Automation November 2017, this is part one of a multi-part post.
Load Data During an Interview (conditionally)
One of the commonest requirements that seems to show up regularly is the need to load, for example, reference data during an interview. And for Public Cloud users, the ability to do just that is now built into the Service Cloud Connection. Let’s look at a very simple example. Suppose that you want to load some product information, depending on some criteria such as the dates of the last few purchases. What you absolutely don’t want to do is load the entire product hierarchy. Just the parts you want relative to your customer scenario : perhaps a customer logging in to the portal.
If you look carefully at the attached image above, you will notice that there is now, on the left hand side, the possibility to add a “New Unrelated Mapping”. I have already added one, based on Product. I can select an unrelated object from Service Cloud and map it into my Oracle Policy Automation November 2017 Project. Although this is delivered as out of the box functionality for the Oracle Policy Automation Cloud Service, it is in theory possible to deliver the same functionality for any Connection, provided you use the newest WSDL (which is referenced here in the documentation). The new capability goes by the name of ExecuteQuery, although the request and response structure are very similar to Load, as you would expect.
Here is a more detailed example of implementing it with a Connection to Oracle Siebel.
Filtering the Data Load
Furthermore, the data load can include the equivalent of an SQL where clause. In the Entity Properties, you now have access to a filtering feature.
The filter can use any field from the underlying table, even if it is not mapped inbound in Oracle Policy Modelling in your Project. The syntax is similar to the natural language of OPA. Notice also, you can limit the number of records retrieved.
This is a very exciting feature that has been requested for a long time. Outside of Service Cloud, Siebel CRM for example with it’s incredibly rich data model, this allows for considerable optimisation of data transfer to Oracle Policy Automation. In the next post in this series we will see some new functions relating to default values, which are going to be a terrific time saver!
See Also : What’s New in November 2017 part two, because there’s more!